The overall success of a domain or forest recovery operation very much depends on the domain controllers being restored from backups. Not only it is important to ensure these domain controllers are restored from recent and trusted backups, it is also necessary to temporarily isolate these domain controllers to guarantee that no dangerous or unwanted data will be replicated to them from their replication partners and to block requests to Active Directory from client workstations during the recovery. Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition isolates domain controllers by creating a service dependency and using custom Internet Protocol security (IPSec) rules.
Before isolating the domain controllers being restored from backups, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition backs up the IPSec settings existing in your environment to revert to these settings later.
Then, at the recovery step named Enable domain controller isolation, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition does the following:
The IsolateDC.bat file is located in the Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition installation folder (by default, this is %ProgramFiles%\Quest\Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition). The IPSec rules defined in the IsolateDC.bat file block all IP traffic between the domain controllers and their replication partners, except for the IP traffic generated by the following tools/services:
These IPSec rules also apply to the IP traffic from the domain controllers to the Forest Recovery Console computer. Traffic from the Forest Recovery Console computer to the domain controllers is not affected by these IPSec rules.
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Note: You can edit the IsolateDC.bat file to define the IPSec rules that become active during recovery. However, we cannot guarantee that problems that may occur if you incorrectly edit the IsolateDC.bat file can be solved. Edit the IsolateDC.bat file at your own risk. |
At the recovery step named Ensure that domain controller isolation is disabled, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition removes the dependency between the Active Directory Domain Services service and the NTDS service and uses the UnisolateDC.bat file to revert to the pre-recovery IPSec settings.
The UnisolateDC.bat file is located in the Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition installation folder (by default, this is %ProgramFiles%\Quest\Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition).
When recovering an Active Directory forest, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition adds the global catalog to the DCs that acted as global catalog servers before the recovery, provided that these DCs were successfully restored from backup.
If none of DCs that acted as global catalog servers before the recovery were successfully restored from backup, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition adds the global catalog to the DC which was assigned the schema master role during the recovery.
To recover your Active Directory forest with the Forest Recovery Console, you can only use backups created with the Recovery Manager Console. In simple environments, it is advisable to have only one Recovery Manager Console deployed. However, this may not be possible in large distributed environments that spread across different physical locations connected by slow links. In this case, you can deploy several instances of the Recovery Manager Console in each main physical location to back up domain controllers there.
You can also deploy several instances of the Recovery Manager Console if you want to
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